Other Records by Britney Spears

Britney Spears

Blackout

In his 1987 culture war manifesto The Closing of the American
Mind, Allan Bloom spills a lot of ink elaborating his resounding
"NO!". Not only are they lacking a common cultural upbringing based in
canonical literature, classical music, and moral philosophy, but their
Eros is off. Rather than channeled and heightened through institutions
of sexual deferment and a tradition of beautifying erotic poetry, Eros
is spent early. The kids are dancing; they are looking at porn; and,
most significantly for Bloom, the kids are listening to rock music.

I am paraphrasing rather loosely, but there is no doubt that Bloom
sees music as a generational obsession with no historical equivalent.
It is "society's greatest madness." Literature, film, technology,
career choice...nothing defines the young identity as thoroughly as
musical affiliation. We pledge allegiance to rock and roll, the
lowbrow howlings of cosmetic revolutionaries and pelvic ministers. The
beat of rock music is the beat of sex, and the fandom of twelve year-olds
is their premature induction into sexual maturity; Bloom's nightmare
is young children singing "Brown sugar, how come you taste so good?"
They cannot authentically be erotic, so they just gyrate and
masturbate and spoil all their potential. It's not the loss of
innocence or lack of family values he laments, but that the soul under
these conditions becomes really boring. All the erotic tension that
used to keep us tight like a bow, hungry with a desire that motivates
us to transcend the mundane, is dissipated by premature ejaculation,
so to speak. Eros used to fill kids with wonder and longing. Now it is
all wasted like so many dribblings of ejaculate on the sheets.

We are all partisans, and so we must be against this sort of
conservative fogeyism. Rock is our passion and our politics, and we
cannot sign on to a theory where rock and roll cannot properly fire
our passions. Neither will we listen when they tell us that hip hop's
misogyny and heterosexism engender hate, nor that the violence in our
video games fills our fantasies. Thus, I am against Bloom, but
ambivalently so. His book haunts me. Like him, I wonder what it has
meant for me to have grown up walking down city streets that read like
a Victoria Secret catalogue, and I wonder if the kids in
America -- fatherless YouTube strippers nourished with nitrates and corn
syrup -- are ok.

Inevitably, I glimpse a blurry outline of Blackout through the
thick fog of BRITNEY, the infinite galaxy of paparazzi bullshit that
ensures I know all about a certain young woman's dedicated sex room
and lack of a sound investment strategy. The spectacle of young female
celebrity dissolution functions for today's parents as the free love
movement did in the '60s, as a nightmare of unbridled sexuality and
the evils of privilege + license. Where are her parents? they
wonder as DUI's fall from the sky like miracles of Paris Hilton-hating
revenge. Meanwhile, their children of thirteen are high and fellating each
other, just as their icons say they should. Of course, this is a
grossly ridiculous amalgamation of media money-making, reactionary
backlash, and our fears of a world gone mad. As with most nightmares,
however, there is truth at the heart: our children are oversexed. And
artists like Britney, though neither cause nor effect, seem to have
something to do with it.

Blackout signals its defiance of our disapproval with the
opening salvo: "It's BRITNEY, bitch." She is BRITNEY the star and we
are all her bitches. From a position "above" all the drama, Britney
proclaims that everyone taking shots at her, from the paparazzi to the
critics and even her listeners, is just a jealous hater. In response
to the hate, Britney gives us a middle-finger-to-the-world album
consisting of two different types of songs: explicit paparazzi
response jamz, and dance floor sex jamz. This is slightly and boringly
complicated by the fact that her club songs consist of a certain kind
of defiant response, since one of the things they seem to say is,
"I'll keep partying whether you bitches like it or not." Lead-off
single "Gimme More" is the exception that stradles the fence -- i.e. an
explicit dance floor paparazzi sex response jam. It's all in (shit,
the whole album is encapsulated by) the first two lines, "It's
BRITNEY, bitch / I see you, and I just wanna dance with you." It's a
dance floor grinding scene that is somehow also the "center of
attention." "Cameras are flashing" and it's actually the crowd
that is singing "gimme more"; though we suspect that its
both the world that wants more BRITNEY and Britney who is saying
"bring it on." "Gimme More" is the best song here and the most
appropriate lead single because its status as sexarazzi explicit dance
response floor gives it a depth lacking in the rest of the record. Its
completion marks the end of any subtext on the album; everything else
just is what it is. Not that I am complaining about a lack of serious
content. I'm as happy as the next guy to listen to vacant
dance music about dancing, and lyrical depth would be out of place on
a Britney record. The issue is rather that ("Gimme More" excepted) the
album completely fails in two of its three intentions. It wants to be
danceable, sexy, and a defiant response to the media shitstorm. It's
not even that danceable.

A consensus seems to be forming around this record that goes
Britney/vocals = bad, producers/tracks = good, with a caveat of "she chose
collaborators well." I'm kind of on board with this except that the
right people here do so many wrong things. I shouldn't write shit
about Danja, and it's months and months too late to call him Timbaland-lite. Still, you play his solo productions on Blackout next to
the team work on FutureSex/LoveSound (2006) and that's exactly how it
feels. You even get Danja's crappy voice ad-libbing and singing hooks
like big bro does, but not as well (which is quite something,
considering Timbaland's vocals). This feeling of disappointment
pervades this record. The tight beats and fat synth
hooks are fashionable and feisty enough, but they're ultimately
frustrated by a sense of not-quite, a feeling that skilled beat-makers
are saving their A-game for next week's gig. The Neptunes production
"Why Should I Be Sad" is particularly disappointing, not just in
comparison to career highlights like last year's Hell Hath No Fury but even
next to previous collaborations like "I'm A Slave 4 U." Everything is
serviceable enough, but none of it pops. It sounds like I should want
to dance to it, but I don't. Good talent, sub-par results. ln baseball
they chalk that up to bad management.

After "Gimme More," the best stab at futuristic club fare is "Piece of
Me." The basic beat+synths+vocal package works here, and it's bolstered by
detailed double-tracked vocals. The hook, "you want a piece of me," is
just the kind of slippery fish that benefits from the vocoder
treatment. So far so good, but then there's the lyrics. Unfortunately,
"Piece of Me" is Britney's anti-papparazzi manifesto, a song dripping
with so much flaccid disdain that its sure to alienate everyone. The
sentiment here oscillates between "piece" as in the piece desired by
the lover, the capitalist, or the tabloid photographer, and "you want
a piece of me?" in the fisticuffs sense. What should've been a much
better song about sexy fisticuffs (!?) comes off as thinly veiled
sour grapes. It's hard to imagine how Britney could have constructed a
dignified response to her media situation, but her faux-arrogant hurt
feelings do nothing but distract. And as far as defiance goes, all
that "Piece of Me" proves is that Britney is pissed -- which, as any
schoolyard bully could tell, just reveals how much it has gotten to
her.

The remainder of my anecdotal complaints ("Toy Soldiers" apes
"Hollaback Girl" with a vengeance; "Ooh Ooh Baby" seems to contain a
"fillin' me up"/"feelin' me up" pun, which is gross) are all eclipsed
by the apparent paradox that this most explicitly sexual of Britney
records is also her least sexy. Score one for Bloom, who understands
that Eros spoils in bright light. The flat lewdness of songs like "Get
Naked (I Have a Plan)" and "Perfect Lover" leaves absolutely nothing
to the imagination. The trying-too-hard unsexiness just hangs there
like an X-rated oops pic. Lines like "Baby I'm just hot for takin' /
Don't you wanna see my body naked" and "Get naked / Get naked / Get
naked" are signifiers of explicitness with no signifieds. I
would never claim a subtle eroticism to Britney's early work, but
at least there were levels. On singles like "...Baby One More Time"
and "Oops!... I Did It Again" the subject was actually love and
relationships. Sex was (not too subtly) implied in the beat, the
gyrating, and the schoolgirl midriffs. Britney said one thing but
meant another. Her double-talk image was similarly tantalizing,
as she played the virgin/whore dichotomy by combining hot pants with
teletubees or in-heat panting with talk of down-home values. All the
young, forbidden hints and inuendos --though completely stupid -- were at
least more titillating than all this cutting to the chase. Britney's
new straight-talking, truculent stripper persona is about as sexy as a
Sue Johanson seminar. For an album that is predicated so thoroughly on
turning us on, this is about as big a flop as it gets.

More than just making me listen to a bad album, Britney makes me
wonder about the state of the West. There are no less than four porn
company reality shows on any given TV night, while HBO and Showcase
recently debuted their most nude-filled series yet. We live in a world
where that which used to fire our imaginations more and more just
assaults our senses. We only get a little of what we need, but the
amount of what we get is staggering. One-dimensional arousal is so
readily available that there is no thrill, no chase. If I sound like a
prude it's because we no longer understand the difference between
sexual freedom and pole dancing fitness classes. Indeed, the central
evil of all this pornographic pablum is not that it makes us grow up
too fast, but that it keeps us infantile. There is thus a strange
continuum between BRITNEY the tabloid nightmare and Britney the artist; both
are predicated on a lowest-common-denominator sexuality that wants to
titillate and shock, but mostly just leaves us cold. Even worse, this shit is everywhere, from the bedroom to the
boardroom to the dark corners of my soul. And if my instincts are
right it's going to be difficult for us not to become very, very
boring because of it.